A moving exploration of mental health and the efficacy of available treatment.
Lowe (Digging for Dirt: The Life and Death of ODB, 2008) deconstructs her decadeslong battle with bipolar disorder and the drug that brought her sanity—at the cost of her physical health.
Until the day she learned it was slowly destroying her kidney function, lithium was nothing less than the author’s elixir of life, the one thing that could tame the mania that had afflicted an adolescence obsessed with messianic beliefs and the secret location of a tunnel to Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch. Those delusions, in addition to the haunting aftereffects of sexual molestation endured years before, landed Lowe in the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute with a seemingly endless supply of lithium-filled Dixie cups. Initially resistant to medication, she relented and slowly began to recover. “Once it was explained that this was an element in everyone’s body and that I just needed more, the three pink pills in the Dixie cup didn’t seem so bad,” writes the author. Buoyed by lithium’s stabilizing power, the author managed to navigate college and set her sights on a new career as a magazine writer in New York City. With an apartment and an entry-level gig at House & Garden secured, life seemed to be going so well that the idea of tapering off lithium didn’t seem to be far-fetched. Unfortunately, that turned out to be a terrible idea, and Lowe embarked on one of the most self-destructive periods of her life. In analyzing her illness, the author dives deep into not just her personal relationship to lithium, but the experiences of others as well. She chronicles her globe-trotting odyssey of self-discovery to the great salt flats of Bolivia, which contain more than half of the world’s lithium supplies, and beyond. In the end, her often chaotic chronicle operates as an earnest memoir of personal triumph and an illuminating exposé of a type of medication that continues to be a source of great debate.
A moving exploration of mental health and the efficacy of available treatment.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-57449-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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